Gratuitous Space Battles

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By Ian Harac

PCWorld| PT

At a Glance

Generic Company Place Holder Gratuitous Space Battles

Gratuitous Space Battles is a game about explosions, lasers,
more explosions, fusion beams, collapsing shields, a few more
explosions, and tactics. A lot of tactics. It's the tactics that
determine if the explosions will be happening on your ships or
theirs.

There is no reflex or speed or reaction time element to this
game at all. Once the battle starts, you are a patient observer.
You can speed up, slow down, or pause the battle, and throw in the
space-towel if you don't want to wait for the bitter end, but you
have no control over your ships or their targets once the fighting
starts.

Gratuitous Space Battles is all about your skill as ship
architect and grand fleet admiral. You design ships, beginning with
any of several empty hulls (both new races and new hulls are
unlocked through play), and fill them up with weapons, engines,
and, if you're feeling unduly compassionate, shields and armor.
Ships include tiny fighters, expendable frigates, and massive
cruisers. Component choices force you to make constant trade-offs
between expense, damage, weapon speed, energy and crew consumption,
and many other factors. Fortunately, the interface is quick and
easy to use, though the micromanagers in the audience may wish to
design massive spreadsheets to optimize everything. I just toss
some weapons in and hope for the best.

One you've made some ships, you get ready to fight. There are
several scenarios, with more unlocked as you play, but they all
boil down to "You have so much money and so many pilots. Build a
fleet." Each ship in your fleet accepts generic orders--focus on
cruisers, protect this other ship, try to stay back if you're
wounded, and so on. In battle, you cannot set targets for your
ships or change orders, so setting up the overall tactics can be
crucial. I have found that changing a few tactical options--setting
more ships to escort duty, for example, or ordering the fighter
wings to focus first on the enemy frigates--can dramatically change
the outcome of a Gratuituous Space Battles scenario.

The actual battles play out like a movie--you can speed them up
or slow them down or pause them or throw in the space-towel, but
you can't control your ships. Just watch the very pretty
explosions, and hope most of them occur on the other guy's
side.

Many scenarios have special limits, such as "Weapon ranges
reduced" or "No cruisers." Each scenario has three levels of
difficulty. Further, you will quickly find one scenario's winning
fleet is another's scrap-metal-to-be, depending on the enemy's
fleet makeup; an enemy fleet may be more vulnerable to fusion beams
than to missiles, or it may be able to clean out your fighters but
not dent your cruisers. You will often need to redesign ships for
each scenario, though some designs will become your standards.

There is no direct PVP mode in Gratuitous Space Battles. Rather,
you can post, or accept, "Challenges" through an online server,
basically downloadable scenarios.

I have a few complaints about the reliability and the game
design. First, the game does tend to crash to desktop with
distressing frequency--usually when switching from one screen to
another, which can cause a loss of a complex deployment as you go
to edit a ship design. It's never crashed mid-battle, though.
Second, given the multitude of ship designs you're likely to make,
the tools for editing and filtering them could be better.

Gratuitous Space Battles is inexpensive and is actively
supported by developer Positech Games and a vibrant community. The
demo contains just enough to get you hooked--you cannot unlock new
weapons or ships, and there's only a few scenarios to play
with--but that was enough for me. If you like the gameplay enough
to burn through all the explosive and tactical possibilities in the
demo, you will be very happy with the complete game.

--Ian Harac

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